The state of Oklahoma announced yesterday that it would pursue murder charges and a possible death sentence against Terry Nichols for his role as Timothy McVeigh's accomplice in the 1995 bombing of a government building in which 168 people died.

The trial of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, in 1997 cost US taxpayers $13.8m (£9.8m), according to figures released yesterday by Richard Matsch, the judge who presided over the trial in Denver.

Within hours of Timothy McVeigh's death by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Monday some web surfers in a US internet chat room followed a web link to watch a bootleg video clip of the execution, and put their computers in danger of invasion by hackers.

Although President Bush used the occasion of Timothy McVeigh's execution to speak to the nation about capital punishment, the death of the Oklahoma bomber is unlikely to stem calls for the abolition of federal executions.

Tomorrow, Timothy McVeigh, the man whose bomb killed 168 people in the federal government offices in Oklahoma City in 1995, will be executed. Every aspect of his last hours - what he said, what he ate and his demeanour as he faced death - will be reported in meticulous detail.

A federal court in Colorado yesterday rejected an appeal to delay the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, ruling that his lawyers had "utterly failed" to demonstrate substantial grounds why he should not be put to death next week.

Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to die on Monday, after a Denver judge turned down his appeal for a delay, ruling there was no doubt over his guilt for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist attack in US history.

Eleven days before he was due to face lethal injection, Timothy McVeigh yesterday appealed for a stay of execution on the grounds that the FBI had withheld vital evidence about its investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Lawyers for Timothy McVeigh said yesterday they planned to ask for his execution to be further delayed in light of new evidence about his 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City government building in which 168 people were killed.

The outgoing FBI director, Louis Freeh, accepted responsibility yesterday for the bureau's "serious error" in failing to deliver more than 3,000 pages of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing to Timothy McVeigh's lawyers.